Short Sellers Resist Covering as S&P 500 Retakes Record in Week
- Short sales kept growing despite persistent gains in stocks
- While at odds with past, it’s in line with prevailing caution
Citigroup's Levkovich Calls Market Sentiment 'Crud'
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It usually doesn’t work this way: stocks vaulting to records, and bearish traders getting more aggressive. Lately, it has.
The S&P 500 Index has climbed 7.9 percent since January, including its biggest gain since April in the just-completed week. At the same time, short interest as a proportion of total shares outstanding has also expanded, rising by 0.3 percentage point to 3.9 percent. Never before has an equity advance as big as this year’s occurred simultaneously with more short sales, according to exchange data compiled by Bloomberg that goes back to 2008.